WordPress Thesis Theme Review

I started using the Thesis theme shortly after it was released for some of my Empty Cabin Media web site design and development work.  I very quickly came to favor it over any other theme available on the market and still do to this day.

What is the Thesis theme for WordPress?

In my opinion, Thesis is inaccurately called just a theme.  Of course it is a WordPress Theme but it’s far more than that.  Let me explain.

Typical Themes in WordPress change the way your website or blog looks.  The content stays the same, but the Theme changes the outward appearance of the blog.  WordPress Themes are a pretty slick feature and frankly it’s amazing to watch a site completely change the way it looks with just the click of a button. Many WordPress themes not only enhance the look of your site, but some add additional features and capabilities to WordPress as well.  This is particular true of premium themes like Thesis.

There are two primary types of Themes available: Free and premium (i.e. not free).  Premium themes generally range in the $30 – $100 dollar range and in most cases are well worth the money spent.

As I said, Thesis is a premium WordPress theme and offers the following features (as of the 1.7 release):

• SEO optimization and control down to the page level.  Thesis from day 1 was extremely SEO optimized, and each release has made improvements.  The latest 1.7 release includes very precise control robots and specify unique meta information for the home page, pages, category and archive pages.
• Options Manager – Any options set within the various themes options screens can be exported and imported.  This means you can back up your settings or or export them for use on another blog or website.
• Fast and efficient – Thesis is high in feature and low on overhead.  It performs very quickly.  I have a few Thesis based sites that have an overall response time of 1-2 seconds for the main page to load.
• JavaScript support – One of the big performance hits a page can incur is the loading of Javascript libraries.  In most themes, the libraries are loaded for every page.  Thesis allows you to specify, per page, which libraries are included if any.
• Look and Feel Tuning everywhere – Various settings provide tons of options for changing the way your blog looks.  You can easily adjust colors, fonts and control which fields are displayed and which are not.  Don’t want a date/time on your posts or comments?  No problem, just click a checkbox or two.  Easily go from 2 to 3 columns, change columns widths, add a multimedia box, add a feature box, etc.
• 301 Redirect support – Thesis 1.7 introduced built in support for 301 redirects, meaning you can route users to affiliate links but mask them so they look nice and clean.
• Built in Magazine style layout – By default, Thesis isn’t a magazine style, but it’s trivial to make it so using Thesis Teasers.  Not sure what I mean, just check out the Side Income Blogging home page.
• Hooks galore - I’ll dive into this more in a minute, but Thesis is full of “hooks” and filters that allow you to fully customize your blog.  I personally like to challenge myself to build Thesis sites where people can’t tell they are built on Thesis.
• Internationalization support – Internal Thesis options support multiple languages.

Thesis isn’t just a WordPress theme, it’s a framework

While all of the above features in and of themselves making Thesis a premium and awesome theme, the real magic of Thesis is found in the hooks and filters.  Thesis allows you to customize it using a custom_functions.php file and a custom.css file:

custom_functions.php – This file is where you put all of your custom hook and filter code, and Thesis has a ton of them.  The Thesis custom functions file allows you to very easily add custom php or HTML code to the theme to do whatever specific thing you might need.  For example, want a feature box with a slider at the top of your blog?  In Thesis, this is literally about 5 lines of code coupled with installing a plugin.

custom.css – The custom.css file is what allows you to override the default Thesis styling.  By default, Thesis is a bit dull to look at, but by using the custom.css file, you can easily completely change the way it looks.  The best part is that you can do this on a per page level, meaning you can make individual pages look completely different.

For me, these two files coupled with the hooks are why I consistently use Thesis for all of my sites.  No more writing custom code in Themes only to have it replaced when the Theme is updated.  I can have all of file custom changes in two files that are not overwritten during an upgrade.  I can additional use these two files to build custom extensions and custom CSS to make a site look however I want.

If you aren’t convinced:

• Here’s a DIYThemes site running Thesis
• Here’s CopyBlogger who also runs Thesis.
• Here’s my Empty Cabin Media site running Thesis (btw, all of the sites in my Portfolio are Thesis as well)
• And this site (the one you’re reading right now) is running Thesis

See what I mean?

The downside

Of course as with everything, there are a few downsides to Thesis as well:

1. The default Theme is boring – Fortunately this is easily fixed, but if you want something that looks slick out of the box, Thesis really isn’t it.
2. You need to know PHP, HTML, and CSS to get the full benefits – For someone that doesn’t know PHP, HTML and CSS it can be a bit overwhelming.   You can easily make a nice looking and functional site with Thesis using the various Options panels, to really tap into the flexibility and awesomeness of Thesis, you need to be able to code a little.  Mitigating this somewhat is the very active support forums where you can find a solution to just about anything you want to do, all you have to do is copy/paste.

In Summary

If you’re looking for a highly customizable, fast, Search Engine Optimized theme that’s backed by a very active support community, Thesis just might be the theme for you.  If you’re not a real technical though, it could be a problem, depending on what you’re trying do.

Personally I think it’s the best and most customizable theme available for WordPress right now.  As I said, I use it for all of my personal sites and for 98% of my client’s sites.  I highly recommend you buy it.